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Lufthansa launches B2B travel platform

Lufthansa Group has expanded on a partnership with Berlin-based start-up Yilu to launch an end-to-end travel and mobility platform.

Since August, Yilu’s platform has allowed Eurowings passengers to book Mytaxi rides directly through the airline’s own app.

Lufthansa says the integration “is only the first partnership” enabled by Yilu – which was founded by Lufthansa and its Innovation Hub. The group says the long-term goal of the company is to consolidate the travel and mobility services from a variety of partners such as hotels and other airlines into one platform.

The Yilu team is training the platform’s “intelligent recommendations logic” to display personalised and contextualised partner offers, according to Lufthansa. The aim is to create user flows that minimise development and maintenance time for partner companies wanting to integrate their services with the platform.

Dr Christian Langer, VP of digital strategy at Lufthansa Group, said: “With Yilu, we are for the first time founding a start-up that targets the entire fragmented landscape of travel and mobility providers and tries to consolidate it with technology. The aim is to smartly link up all services in order to improve the travel experience – even beyond flying.”

Mark Meusch, CEO of Yilu, added: “At Yilu we are currently concentrating on the technological groundwork. We are working on the core, namely the platform technology, integrated user flows and expansion of the partner network. The next step is to add a recommendations engine. This is a long-term undertaking. Yet the first results show that we are on the right path.”

Lufthansa says it hopes to sign up further partners for the platform over the coming year.